Clavius mosaic.

[John9929]

I had intended going to bed early last night until I saw the moon rise, then I had thoughts of trying an image of the LCROSS crash site in Cabeus crater. Seeing conditions were not ideal early on but as the moon rose higher it steadied down quite a bit, and of course the ETX 90mm had time to cool. By 0230BST it had clouded over 100% so show over! I took a few runs of avi in the order of 500 frames each with an x2 barlow and IR/UV filter and then merged these two in iMerge to give me a mosaic of two shots, totalling about 1000 frames, which took the rest of the night and all day to process in Registax! This is about the limit of a 90mm mirror but the detail is quite pleasing. Clavius is the large crater in the top frame, and the well formed crater in the bottom frame is Moretus. Below it and left is Newton, and below it is the high rim of Cabeus. Somewhere just beyond this mountain in the shadows lie the remains of LCROSS and its Centaur rocket.

[martinastro]

John, that is amazing detail for an 90mm ETX!!, well worth the time and effort to get a detailed high res result like that. Great stuff.

[markt]

Fantastic capture John!

[John9929]

Thanks lads, nice that the hard work is appreciated!

[rjgjr]

Great images John. I actually view the LCROSS impact with a 10", but as expected, didn't see anything. Should have been smart and watched it on NASA TV as I did later and stayed in bed. At least it was a warm morning!

[Carl O Beirnes]

Hi John,

That is a very good image great detail. Just one thing keep an eye on your focusing or check the collimation. well do on a very good image.

Carl.